http://www.smh.com.au/sport/football/a-battle-for-the-wages-20091218-l5sk.html
A battle for the wages
December 19, 2009
Former Socceroos captain Paul Okon believes the NRL should ditch the salary cap and adopt the English Premier League model, writes Daniel Lewis.
Like its most decorated player, Manchester United's Ryan Giggs, it is fast, powerful, skilful, massively entertaining, immensely wealthy and boasts a global appeal. The English Premier League is a stage as spectacular as its brightest stars.
Giggs, 36, has played virtually his entire career in the revolutionary competition that is the Premier League. It was a revolution that saw the clubs take control of the competition, as NRL clubs have threatened to do in Australia.
Football commentators like Alan Hansen, who captained Liverpool from 1985 to 1990, have no doubt that England's football product has never been better.
''The speed, intensity, fitness and the number of absorbing games are unmatched anywhere in the world,'' he said in
The Premiership in Focus, a BBC book that looks at the first 15 years of the Premier League.
Giggs, who grew up in Wales, made his first appearance for United in the 1990-91 season and has been a regular first-team player since the 1991-92 season, when United finished runners-up to Leeds in the last year of the old First Division before the Premier League replaced it.
English football's
Roy of the Rovers days were over as the Premier League embarked on a journey that made it bigger, better and sexier than Italy's Serie A and Spain's La Liga.
A talent as sublime as Giggs would once almost certainly have been lost to the likes of AC Milan or Real Madrid, but such is the strength of the Premier League that the winger is now in his 19th season at Old Trafford.
As well as retaining Britain's finest, the Premier League has been a magnet for the world's greatest footballing talent - including former Australian captain Paul Okon, who is now assistant coach with Gold Coast United in the A-League.
Before going to the Premier League to play with Middlesbrough and Leeds, Okon played in Italy's Serie A with Lazio and Fiorentina.
''The Italian competition was regarded for many years as the place where every foreign player wanted to go and play, but that's slowly changed and it's now England where you will see the best foreign players playing,'' he said.
Okon, 37, says that if NRL clubs are serious about growing their competition and displaying the finest talent available, they must look at copying the Premier League model.
It is a model, he said, that has enabled the clubs to maximise revenue via television. ''It allows you to invest more, pay more money to get the best players. [The Premier League] really was designed for the clubs to generate more money to really become the best competition in the world. People want to see the best games and the best players.''
And just like clubs in the Premier League, NRL clubs would have to be free to pay what was necessary in the pursuit of excellence. The salary cap would have to go, he said. ''To take it to the next level, to keep your stars here, it's definitely something they need to look at.''
Okon said one of the NRL's biggest problems was stopping stars going to England or rugby union - or now even to AFL. ''Football, globally, it's very difficult to cap things,'' he said. By creating a wealthy competition like the Premier League, all clubs would be able to survive without a cap.
Despite the lack of a cap - and some players earning more than $200,000 a week - ''you don't really see clubs going under [in the Premier League],'' Okon said.
A key criticism of the Premier League is that it has entrenched the power of the big four clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal - and made the competition boring.
Okon rejects that, saying sporting competitions around the world survived despite having clubs with seemingly bottomless pockets. And ''even though they don't have a cap, you still see the so-called smaller teams beating the bigger teams''.
''[The English Premier League clubs] have been able to move forward and grow a competition into something unique. The amount of money that's generated as a consequence of them breaking away and forming this EPL has been amazing.''
HOW THE ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE SYSTEM WORKS
* Founded in 1992 when the top tier of English football clubs declared they wanted a more equitable piece of the ever-expanding media rights pie - succeeding the previous model that split revenues among the top four tiers - the English Premier League has remained the most successful and lucrative model for breakaway leagues.
* 20 teams play each other twice a year, with the top 6-8 teams [depending on various criteria] qualifying for European competitions while the bottom three teams are relegated to the division below, the Football League Championship. Three clubs are promoted from the Championship each year.
* All matches are held in all-seater modern stadiums, a recommendation of the Taylor Report but fuelled by the substantial money coming into the game.
* Television rights for the league are sold by the Premier League organisation, while the Football League looks after three professional divisions below. In other countries, such as Italy and Spain, individual clubs sell their rights to their home games.
* The most recent EPL television rights deal, negotiated by British Sky Broadcasting as the primary broadcaster and Setanta as the secondary broadcaster, started in 2007 and runs out in 2010. BSkyB spent £1.314 billion, while Setanta spent £392 million.
* Television dividends are split between the 20 clubs, who make around £28m each year. By comparison, clubs from the Championship earn just £1m in television revenue.
* Clubs are given ''parachute payments'' of £6.5m for a subsequent two years after relegation.
* There is no salary cap.
* A challenge to the legality of the EPL's excessive bargaining power from the Office of Fair Trading saw this rights deal contribute £118.5m to developing neglected football facilities at lower levels.
Daniel Lewis
